Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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Krokodile Cart (2004)
The Krokodile Cart, by Armin Vogl, was a flash memory based cartridge that let users load and run almost any binary on a real 2600. I say "was" because it's been out of production for several years now, although you might be able to find a used one.
This was the first contest I won at AtariAge, and given the number and quality of entrants, it surprises me to this day that my label was chosen. What was particularly cool about winning this contest was that it was a product a lot of people were clamoring for - particularly programmers. I don't know if winning this one helped me gain more exposure with programmers (and therefore more work on homebrews), but it certainly didn't hurt. 
The concept I had was simple enough: the cart was called the Krokodile Cart, and it was a flash memory multi-cart. Hence, the flashing, multi-cart carrying crocodile.
The line art was created in Painter, starting as a rough sketch, then cleaned up and inked using Painter's pen tools.
Since Painter is a bitmap program, and to create the cleanest line drawing I could, I brought the file into FreeHand and used its auto-trace feature to turn it into vector artwork. That way I could resize it to any resolution I wanted.
From there, I imported it into Photoshop where the rest of the label was created, including all of the painting, text and so forth. Even after almost 10 years, I still really like the artwork. The expression on the croc's face as he'd just flashed someone seems appropriately mischievous, if not a little salacious.
My only real issue with it is the line quality isn't as clean on the final label as I would have liked. I'm not sure why that happened exactly. I suspect it had something to do with how Photoshop anti-aliased the FreeHand file when it was imported (my memory's a bit vague on it, but it seems to me that was a problem). That, or the way I was selecting regions to paint might have degraded the lines (I've since refined that process). Working at a higher resolution probably would have helped, but a better solution would have been to redraw the outline completely in FreeHand, rather than using auto-trace. When drawing natively with vectors, you can get much smoother curves and cleaner lines. With auto-tracing, the art is smoothed out a little, but it still retains the inherent flaws and shaky lines from the original drawing.
Contest Entries
For the contest entries, I revisited the label style I first tried with Climber 5. And again, since I was still enamored with Industria, that font made a reappearance here as well:
In the previous two entries I mentioned that if I had to do it over, I'd have submitted those designs as Atari-style labels. The reason being was that both Climber 5 and Backfire were won by Atari-style labels. I didn't know if that was a determining factor or not, but two in a row certainly got me thinking about it.
I had avoided using Atari-style labels for the two previous contests because I wanted to submit completely original designs (a topic I'll revisit in future posts). But I figured if I was going to have a chance for the Krokodile Cart, I'd better hedge my bets.
With that in mind, I submitted Atari picture and silver label variations for the contest. The winner ended up being the picture label. The submission differs from the final production version in that the Atari logo was removed, the commercial cartridges inside the Krok's coat were swapped out for homebrew labels, and some other minor tweaks were made:
I also submitted a second variation of the non-Atari label, but with a green background. My original roughs had used a green background, but Dave Dries (who I had collaborated with on some other projects) suggested using a complementary color to make the Krokodile stand out. It was a good suggestion, but since I still liked the green version, I submitted it anyway. And of course, the purple won. 
What I'll probably never know (unless Armin is reading this) - is whether or not I would have won without submitting the Atari-style label. But I did win, and so from here on out, I'd continue to include Atari-style variations in contests.
Until it got out-of-hand, that is.
But that's another story.
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